Niche Launches Web3 Social Platform from Former Tinder, Bumble & Facebook Leaders, with $1.8M in Funding
An entrepreneur who invented Tinder’s swipe feature and a top Facebook “do no evil” engineer joined forces to create Niche: an ad-free web3 social content app for membership-based clubs. It is a connective space for individuals with similar interests to engage in a community together; where everyone owns their content and is rewarded for their contributions.
Niche is for:
Content Creators who want direct distribution to their most engaged fans
Collectors who want to buy and sell with ease
Hobbyist groups who want a digital home for their real-world communities
Current social media platforms profit from selling you ads. They harvest your data to create targeted ads that are more likely to apply to you and make them more money. This leads to poor content, easy propagation of misinformation, and a loss of privacy. One of the more challenging outcomes is the impact social media has on mental health; the platforms intentionally keep users hooked on their phones to see more ads. Niche is solving this product addiction by removing ads altogether. In fact, here’s a notable distinction: social media has users, and Niche has owner-members.
Niche is reinventing social media by distributing ownership of your networks to its members. Rather than traditional social media that uses your content to sell targeted ads, Niche Clubs reward engagement and content creation with token ownership. Each club has its own unique tokens that accrue real value over time and can be used for commerce, event admission, and membership status. The token can be exchanged for real currency. That means your networks are now part of your net worth. Niche fulfills the web3 promise of decentralized ownership and reinvents social media along with it.
On August 2nd, 2022, Niche announced that the app is officially live on the App store and is currently in private beta. Members can apply with an invite code or join the waitlist to the website at Niche.club. In the most recent Newsletter from Niche, they announced that within one day on the App Store, there were over 1000 members on their waitlist.
The company has an impressive team, co-founded by Christopher Gulczynski, CEO, and Zaven Nahapetyan, CTO. Chris is the co-founder, CCO, and patented co-inventor of “the swipe” feature for Tinder and co-creator and CPO of Bumble. Zaven was a senior engineering manager at Facebook, who created and led many significant projects like Facebook fundraisers and initiatives promoting election engagement and fighting misinformation.
“More than ever, people seek belonging and connection. In this digital world, affinity is more important than proximity. Thats our mission at Niche: to help people find their communities and have that belonging.” — Zaven
“I think the trend in social networking right now is to get smaller, to get more intimate around that relational status of everyone in the group.” — Chris
The Niche team also announced that they received a grant from the NEAR Foundation and pre-seed investments from MetaWeb and Alumni Ventures Group — totalling $1.8M.
“We’re really excited to have Niche building on NEAR. Social networking is the next major growth vertical in Web3 and Niche is the perfect team to accelerate that growth on NEAR. Their approach to community ownership and user-owned data resonates with our core values of usability and openness” — Near Protocol Co-founder, Illia Polosukhin
To learn more about Niche, subscribe to their Newsletter via website, follow them on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook, and join the community on Discord.
